One thing that struck me at the time is that of the 50 finalists, not one was from Japan.

Japan has a huge number of passionate educators who deserve recognition. I would love to see some of them in the finalists for the 2016 Global Teacher Prize.

Teachers of children between 5 and 18 years are eligible, and the judges are looking for:

Recognition of a teacher’s achievements in the classroom and beyond from pupils, colleagues, head-teachers or members of the wider community.

Encouraging others to join the teaching profession. Contributing to public debates on the teaching profession, whether through writing articles, blogs, media participation, social media campaigns, events or conferences.

That’s actually quite a strange feeling. The last couple of years have been great for me in terms of chances to present. I’ve been all over Japan and met all sorts of great people. You can see some of the presentations on the Sendaiben Youtube channel.

However, I have started to feel a bit burned out. In 2014 I will be attending some conferences as a participant, not a presenter. I’ll also be working on some really exciting new projects (stay tuned for more information soon).

I hope to be doing a lot more writing next year, on this blog and elsewhere.

Like this:

This is only going to be of interest if you use Google’s excellent Google Reader service to consume your web content via RSS feeds.

If you have no idea what that means, stop reading now 😉

I logged into Google Reader a couple of days ago to discover that Google is planning to discontinue the service in July. Seems like they weren’t able to monetize it sufficiently, or there weren’t enough users, or something data-driven like that.

While I’m sure they have their reasons, I was unpleasantly surprised. I’ve been using Reader for years now to read blogs and webcomics and really like the simplicity, and how well it syncs across computers and mobile devices.

Fortunately I am not the only one with this problem, and it seems as though Feedly has decided that they would like to snap up all of the Google Reader customers. If you go to their website, you can sign in with your Google account and when the time comes they will migrate all your settings to their system.

I’ve been playing with Feedly on Windows and my iPhone since yesterday and so far it seems like a good solution. It’s not the same as Reader, but it comes close, and I’m sure it will be fine once I get used to it.

So as a public service announcement, if you need a replacement for Reader, Feedly seems like a relatively painless solution.